What Prepared Me To Be CEO - David Kong, DEI Advisors

Josiah: 0:00

David Kong is the founder and principal of DEI Advisors, a nonprofit focused on empowering others. Previously, he was the president and CEO of BWH Hotel Group and when he retired from that role, he was the longest-running CEO of any major hotel company. In this episode, you'll learn what prepared him to lead as CEO lessons that you can apply to your own career today.

Josiah: What skills or experiences were most useful early in your career to prepare you for eventually leading Best Western as CEO?

David: 0:53

I would start at the very beginning. If you want to be successful, you have to be a great individual contributor, meaning you need to be really good at what you do. And, by the way, you cannot be a one-trick pony. You can't be just good at one thing, you need to learn to be good at many disciplines. So for me, when I was working my way up the ladder, I was initially in food and beverage. I was a busboy, waiter, restaurant manager, banquet manager, assistant, and food and beverage director. Food and beverage director. I was in food and beverage, but I made it a point to learn what was going on in rooms. So I got into rooms and I know how to make a bed. I know how to run housekeeping, I know I was a front desk clerk so I knew how to run the front desk and I've been an auditor. I know how to do the books at night. So I branched off and learned a lot of things, and I always had an interest in finance and accounting because I was a food and beverage controller for a while. So I have a lot of different experiences that made me a very desirable general manager candidate when it was time to consider me for that position, and then after that when you're working yourself up the ladder, you also want to be acquiring the skills of being a good team leader. You have to be a good leader of people, so you need to learn the EQ part of the business. You need to pay attention to people's feelings and know what motivates them. People are just wired differently and you can't be all things to people. You have to be very customized in your approach to what people's needs are and try to help them. And taking an interest in people, and especially in their career, is really important and how you motivate people. Asking people for opinions is also important. Tony Capuano, the CEO of Marriott, told me the story in his interview that Bill Marriott's first question that he learned he found extremely beneficial. His question is what do you think and he asked that question of the front desk clerks, the doorman, the restaurant waiter. And that's a great way to engage people. Not only do you find out what's going on and what needs to be done, you also make that person feel important. I don't know how many times as a CEO I've walked into some department head's office and I ask what do you think? That person just feels like a million. This CEO would come into my office and ask me my opinion or something. That's great, but I am the one that's actually benefiting from it, because I learn what's going on and I learn what to do and what not to do and I make that person feel good and therefore he's, he or she is much more engaged. So be a good team leader. The third one is, as you start to move up the ladder to a high position, you have to bring your strategic thinking to the table. Best strategic thinking is you can't get there just like that. It's not, you're not born with it. There's some talent to it, but a lot of it is through exposure and through trial and error, and it's, I always say, you know, if we make decisions, quite often based on intuition. But how do you build an intuition? How do you keep refining it? It's by trial and error. You try new things. If it works, you learn to do that. If it doesn't work, you learn not to do that and over time, you build wonderful intuition. Likewise, over time, through all the exposures, you have that strategic thinking that you can bring to the table, which is really important for executive-level positions. So, working up the ladder as a general manager, I was very well around that candidate. But likewise, I had five promotions in three and a half years at Best Western Hotels & Resorts to become the CEO. And people say, oh, you are so lucky. And I say, yeah, luck does have some part to do with it, because it gave me an opportunity. But if you didn't bring the substance, you won't be considered and I want to be the most qualified candidate when that opportunity knocks. How do you become the most qualified candidate? Well, it's through doing a lot of things and acquiring a lot of experiences that other people don't have. So for me at Hyatt, I was general manager and very comfortable lifestyle. You live in, you take the elevator to work, you order room service within a great lifestyle. And then I was asked one day to head up the business process reengineering efforts at Hyatt, which is to find new ways of thinking about how to do things. You know how to do accounting differently, how to do rooms and food and beverage and every department differently. It's a job that nobody knew how to do because there was never such a job in the past. I took that job and I did that for three years and then I was asked to head up the sales and marketing areas, database development efforts, and in the early 90s nobody even heard of database. That's another job that nobody knew how to do. I took that and I launched the first Hyatt.com. I use the database to deploy our sales team to do one-on-one marketing and so on and so forth, and so I quite a lot of great experiences. And then I went and became a consultant, which is another new endeavor that a lot of people wouldn't even think of doing. But you know, when it was time for the board to consider candidates for the CEO position at Bass Western, nobody could touch me because I had such great track record to begin with and such vast array of experiences that they look at me and say this is the guy.

Josiah: 6:54

That's amazing, and you talked about cross-functional training or learning in these departments. There's the EQ development, building relationships, understanding people, and making them feel good. Are there any other skill sets you think people often overlook that are important for working in the C-suite or leading a company?

David: 7:18

I have interviewed a lot of candidates over the years and I find that opportunities are there, but the candidates are frequently not ready to capitalize on those opportunities, and that's why I launched the DEI Advisors, and our mission is self-empowerment. So I basically want to prepare individuals to think boldly about their career aspirations and to be able to pursue those dreams without hesitation. And there are so many areas that are lacking in the candidates that I've interviewed things like networking. Some people are born to be gregarious and outgoing and they make friends easily and they're likable. We are lucky. But not all of us are born that way. I was born an introvert, so I find networking to be difficult. But your network is your net worth. It's not what you know, it's who you know and you have to have a good network of people that you can lean on in times of challenges and setbacks and in times of opportunities too. You want people to speak up on your behalf. So you have to spend time cultivating your network, and a lot of people simply shy away from doing that because they don't know how to do that. Well, it's a very simple thing. It's having a genuine conversation with people and taking an interest in other people and finding ways that you can be helpful to the other person. That's the beginning of building a network. And then, once you have some good friends that way, then you can lean on those friends to make other friends because they can make referrals for you, and then pretty soon you start to grow your network. But growing a network is extremely important if you want to move up the ladder.

Josiah: 9:15

What I'm hearing from you is that depth is really important, right? The depth of character, the depth of being mentally ready to take advantage of opportunities to have a deep network of relationships is important, and my understanding is that this was pivotal, even as you assume CEO responsibilities at Best Western, where people had seen your work, they trusted you, they knew who you were, and so this isn't just an idea, this is part of your own story to getting to the top right.

David: 9:42

Oh, absolutely you. First and foremost, you have to be a trustworthy, dependable, respectable person, right? And people have to like you because you're honest and because you have integrity and because you're a performer and they want to be in your company, and so all those things are really basic things that you need to have within you. That's first and foremost. Those are the foundations. If you are not an honest person who wants to be your friend, right? So you have to have that character in you first. Trust is the foundation of any relationship, so you've got to build that foundation first.

Josiah: 10:25

A couple of follow-up questions on what you said. Would you advise people who want to lead hotel companies to work in consulting for a bit? I'm hearing this to be a recurring theme. I was talking to Sloan Dean at Remington Hotels. He spent some time in consulting as well. Is it maybe something people should consider for that exposure and strategic thinking?

David: 10:45

I think being a consultant is the best thing anybody can do to start their career, especially earlier on. For me, it taught me so many things. It taught me the art of listening, which is really important. You'd be amazed Even the board of directors at West Weston had told me the reason that you hired it is not only because of experience, but because you listened well. So the act of listening skills is really a key ingredient to anybody's success because when you are actively listening to someone, you are paraphrasing what that person said to ensure you understood it. You make that person feel important. Any time when I was a consultant, I was a consultant. If I can regurgitate back to the executives at a company what they said, they love it because they feel important sharing that with you and they feel like, oh, he got it. I'll tell you a side story about the importance of active listening and the importance of seeking first to understand because if you are practicing active listening, you are trying to understand first before imposing your own opinion. I was the CEO of Best Western and I was asked to mediate a disagreement between two CEOs in our company. They are CEOs of two major countries and I was listening to them and it dawned on me that they were just raising their voices and not hearing one another. So I asked one of them. I said OK, Giovanna, can you repeat to me what Marcus just said? And she thought about it for a moment. She said oh, I think that's what he said. And I said to Marcus well, can you repeat to me what Giovanna said? And he paused also. He said I think she said the same thing that I did. You know it's hilarious. It's amazing People express themselves in different ways, but then when they really process it, it's the same thing that they were all trying to make the other person hear. So it's really important to have good listening skills.